“I don’t know if my son is okay, if he is sick, I don’t know if he is eating at all,“ Wilmer Gutierrez, Merwil’s father, told AFP.
Merwil does not know why he was taken to El Salvador's notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in a wave of deportations that has stirred legal debate in the United States over a lack of due process and alleged human rights violations, his father said.
The agents initially asked for another man with a different name, his father said.
He last spoke to his son while Merwil was detained in a Texas processing center where he learned that he would be deported the next day. Both men assumed it would be to their native Venezuela.
Until US authorities issued a list of those deported to El Salvador some days later, Wilmer was in the dark about his son's whereabouts.
'Simply a kidnapping'
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.
Previously, the US Supreme Court and several district courts had temporarily halted the expulsions.
Together with other migrant support organizations, they are considering seeking a court order demanding the government correct its abuse of power.
In Merwil's case, two US lawmakers from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Adriano Espaillat, said in a statement “we are horrified by ICE’s abduction of Merwil Gutierrez, who was violently taken from his doorstop in the Bronx and deported to El Salvador.”
Wilmer insists his son, whom he describes as passionate about clothing and shoes, did not have the tattoos commonly linked by law enforcement to the violent Tren de Aragua Venezuelan street gang.
On the night of his arrest, Merwil was off work.
“Look at his childlike face,“ he said wistfully.
“If they send him back to Venezuela... I would grab my suitcase and leave -- that’s where the American dream ends.”
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